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A matcha libre cocktail served at Amalga Distillery in July 2017. (Photo by Scott Ciambor)The fate of toddies, sours and mules at Alaska distilleries is still uncertain. The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board is struggling to decide whether the businesses should be allowed to serve cocktails. At a meeting Monday, the board revisited an advisory instructing distillers to stop mixing drinks. But, they didn’t come to any new conclusions.“We’ve been doing this from the start,” Rob Borland told the board. “We’ve been making fine liquors. We’ve been squeezing our own juice for our cocktails, we’ve been doing all of that kind of stuff from the beginning.”Borland is the owner of Ursa Major Distilling in Fairbanks. He’s one of several distillers who called into Monday’s meeting to oppose banning mixed drinks.Last month, the ABC Board upheld an advisory prohibiting the sale of cocktails made with products not produced on-site.Since then, some distilleries have continued to serve cocktails made with mixers they produce themselves. Things like syrups, tonic water, ginger beer and liqueurs. The state hasn’t issued any violations for this.But in a memo ABC Board Director Erika McConnell said the cocktails distilleries are serving are not what she envisioned as ‘the distillery’s product’ when she sent out the advisory. So, she went back to the board for more guidance.Jared Curé owns the Narrows Bar in Juneau. He told the board anything considered distillery products should be bottled and sold like their liquor.“It’s just a slippery slope,” Curé said. “A lot of these people that are chiming in, I don’t think they’re bad actors but if we allow this kind of model to go on in certain ways without putting clear controls on it, people can push the limits even further.”The board was split on what to do.Ellen Ganley said they shouldn’t ban distillers from using non-alcoholic beverages.“I think we have to be really careful here because we do have nine businesses that are in at least some respect having the rug pulled out from underneath them,” Ganley said.Thomas Manning disagreed. He said for something to be considered a distillery product, it needs to be part of the manufacturing process.“I think that someone standing behind a bar and pouring orange juice into the vodka is not manufacturing onsite,” Manning said. “That’s mixing a drink.”Bob Klein recused himself from the discussion as the board’s chair. But, speaking as the CEO of Anchorage Distillery, he said regulating non-alcoholic products is a slippery slope.“It’s just very, very dangerous ground we’re treading on,” Klein said.Rex Leath asked whether the board is even allowed to have a say about products that don’t contain alcohol.“I’m not comfortable trying to regulate anything that’s non-alcoholic,” Leath said. “I don’t feel like I have the authority to do that.”While that is true, Assistant Attorney General Harriet Milks said once the drink is mixed, it’s a different story. Milks is counsel to the board.“If you have a glass of orange juice in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other hand, the board cannot regulate the hand with the orange juice,” Milks said. “But if you pour them together, then the board can regulate that.”After several failed motions, the board couldn’t come to an agreement. Instead, they’ll revisit the advisory at a November meeting. At that point, new draft regulations for distilleries should be available from Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office staff. Until the issue is clarified, the agency will not issue violations to distilleries selling drinks using products they make on-site.read more

Former Goldman Sachs Exec Predicts Doom for Housing Forecast Goldman Sachs Home Prices White House 2014-09-18 Scott_Morgan Share in Daily Dose, Data, Headlines, News Former Goldman Sachs executive Joshua Pollard on Wednesday sent a sobering 18-page report to the White House warning of a potential nosedive in home prices that could put the country back into a recession before the ripples of the previous one settle.According to Pollard, the former head of the Goldman’s housing research team, home price appreciation is outpacing income, and the United States is on the brink of a 15 percent decline in home prices over the next three years. Rising interest rates and values will cause already overvalued homes (Pollard says values are 12 percent higher than they should be) to be even further out of sync with reality and generate an unnatural surplus that will itself lead to a slowdown in investor purchases.Flipped homes have declined 50 percent in the last year, and home flippers are losing money outright in New York City, San Francisco, and Las Vegas according to the report.If Pollard is correct, the impact on the U.S. economy would be seismic. Overvalued homes, according to his report to President Obama, make up $23 trillion of consumer asset value and “serve as the psychological linchpin” for $17 trillion of invested capital.Put together, that 15 percent decline translates to a $3.4 trillion cut to consumers’ net worth.”As an economist, statistician and housing expert, I am lamentably confident that home prices will fall,” he wrote. “Home price devaluation will expose a major financial imbalance that could lower an entire generation’s esteem for the American dream.”Student debt and a 45 percent underemployment rate for recent college grads has handicapped millennial buyers already, Pollard wrote.Pollard outlined three distinct stages of the decline—the first of which, the “hot-to-cool” stage, is already underway. This is where home price growth slows and turns negative in large markets across the country. Investors slow their purchases, homebuilders lose pricing power as absorption rates decline, and press outlets shift their market pieces from positive to mixed.In Stage II, the “demand-to-supply” phase, new negative shocks cause investors to shift from raising prices in an effort to outbid competition to reducing prices to beat future declines. In Stage III, the “deflation and response” phase, consumers come to the decision that now is a bad time to buy a home. Fewer people seek mortgages and banks become less willing to lend. Consequently, deflation hits, taking jobs with it and triggering calls for new policy.In other words, Pollard fears the recent past will be prologue. His report squarely targets public finance and housing officials and calls upon the White House to devise “forward-looking monetary policy that balances the risk of raising interest rates,” create a skilled trade externship program for laborers whose jobs are most at risk whenever housing investments drop, and “forcefully rebalance number of homes to the number of households” by reducing the number of new builds as well as the number homes that can force prices down—particularly those that are already vacant, unsafe, and expensive to rehabilitate, the report states.”The shift from a good market to a bad market occurs quickly, exaggerated by the circular currents of confidence from consumers, investors and lenders in Unison,” Pollard wrote. “When unnatural levels of demand or supply impact the market, prices are pushed in lockstep.” September 18, 2014 2,654 Views read more